Empire WatchAnalysis of current world affairs with focus on gloabal struggle for social and economic justice and against racism, war, imperialism and oppression much of it brought on by US Empire and its allies

US Mourns the Death of a Barbaric Dictator

What’s disgraceful about the monarchy of Saudi Arabia isn’t just its medieval, reactionary and misogynist leaders like King Abdullah who died yesterday at the age of 90 and his brother who is in line to take the throne, or the beheadings that they do everyday for punishment, including of their political opponents, or how they treat women, not even allowing them to drive. All that is disgraceful, despicable and revolting in this 21st Century, and to be expected of such backward, corrupt and despotic religious fundamentalists, who sell their vast amount of oil to support their lavish and wasteful lifestyle and use billions of dollars of the proceeds to spread the most extreme and fundamentalist branch of Islam called Wahhabi, which is the driving ideology behind groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS. That too is disgraceful. But, what’s even more disgraceful and despicable is the US government that considers such reactionary despotic and fundamentalist criminals their close ally in the region, along with other despots like the King of Jordan or General Al Sissi of Egypt, who overthrew an elected government and established a military dictatorship and who kills and tortures his opponents and jails journalists. It really is disgraceful how the U.S. sells billions of dollars of weapons to such dictatorships and criminal regimes like Saudi Arabia and turns a blind eye on how they fund terror groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS, which end up killing Americans and other Westerners. It’s disgraceful how the U.S. joins forces with such reactionary despots to undermine and overthrow governments they find unhelpful with their plans for world domination for their multinational corporations.

President Obama only had praise for King Abdullah on the occasion of his death yesterday because he cooperated with Washington, not so much in “the war on terror” that the President speaks of and that President Bush and Cheney before him spoke of – Saudi leaders have contributed to terrorism, not acted against it – but because he cooperated with the U.S. imperialism to advance “US interests”, which of course means the interests of US multinational corporations.

King Abdullah, whom CNN and other corporate news outlets can’t stop admiring, was a major contributor to the barbaric Jihadis of ISIS, which the US has declared war on. And while ISIS fighters were only massacring the Syrian people, the US was okay with them and their barbaric beheadings because, like Saudi Arabia, the US too found the Syrian government undesirable and wanted it gone. The US fight against ISIS started only after they became a threat to “US interests”. Compare the treatment of US corporate media of such a despicable despot as King Abdullah with their treatment of Fidel Castro or the late Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, who didn’t cooperate with US corporate Empire to enrich US billionaires. There is of course no comparison. And, while we’re on the topic of US “friends” in Middle East, how can we forget the colonial settler state of Israel, which using US taxpayers’ money and the full support of US government, is committing ethnic cleansing and genocide against the occupied and defenseless people of Palestine? King Abdullah had no problem with that, either.

A barbaric misogynist despot who for geopolitical and economic reasons was a close US ally is dead and the corporate media and the corporate President only have kind words to say about him. Imperialism has absolutely no shame, no decency and no humanity. Their God is money and money knows no such unnecessary niceties as shame, decency or humanity.